By Cary Darling From Houston Chronicle

It’s a warm, sunny day during South by Southwest, the annual schmoozapalooza when the lords and ladies of Hollywood and Silicon Valley convene over brisket and backslaps, and Armie Hammer could almost blend into the starry crowd at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin.

Still, as the 6-foot-5 actor strides through the busy garden — a camera crew is waiting for comedian/actor Bill Hader to arrive — he can’t help but stand out. It’s that quality that had producers swooning about discovering a new leading man when he played both of the blue-blood Winklevoss twins in the 2010 film “The Social Network,” the first time most moviegoers had ever heard of him.

Yet the siren song of Hollywood nearly led him to crash on the rocks of career overreach. No doubt there were some who thought“The Lone Ranger” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” reboots sounded like a sure thing, but dismal box-office proved otherwise. Even his choice of indies — from “Mine,” in which he played a soldier stuck on a land mine for most of the movie, to “The Birth of a Nation,” which tanked after revelations about sexual assault charges against director Nate Parker came to light — seemed cursed. That’s not even mentioning Ben Wheatley’s gun-crazy Tarantino knock-off, “Free Fire,” one of the floppiest flops of 2017.

But don’t cry for Hammer, the 31-year-old great-grandson of oil-baron philanthropist Armand Hammer. He has started to turn things around. The 2016 thriller “Nocturnal Animals” and the 2017 romantic drama “Call Me by Your Name” are bringing him back into critical good graces — even though it was “Name” co-star Timothée Chalamet who nabbed the Oscar nomination.

Now, he’s here at South by Southwest with two indie films: “Final Portrait,” an intimate sketch of the friendship between artistAlberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) and writer James Lord(Hammer), directed by actor Stanley Tucci; and the woozily surreal comic-drama “Sorry to Bother You,” in which Hammer plays an evil CEO of a lifestyle company that’s “disrupting” the economy with slave labor. “Final Portrait” comes out Friday, while “Sorry to Bother You,” one of the more talked-about films at SXSW, hits theaters in July.

“There was definitely an intent in terms of working on smaller projects now,” said Hammer, seated at a table in the garden wearing a black T-shirt and slacks. “I gave the big, studio movies an honest go and it just didn’t quite work out for me the same way that it might for other people. And, at the end of the day, I was OK with that.

“It allowed me then to focus on projects that I wanted to do from a place of passion. ‘Call Me by Your Name’ was a big turning point for me because it was the first film I ever did just for the sake of making art. It was just so invigorating and sort of edifying from an artistic standpoint and from a personal standpoint. It was like, ‘You know what? I’m happy with this. I think I found what I love to do.’”

‘Portrait’ of the artist

The two new films show off different sides of Hammer’s acting personality. In “Final Portrait,” set in early ’60s France, he’s a well-dressed, well-coiffed man of artistic leisure who’s taking a few days off from puttering around Paris to act as a model for a Giacometti painting. It’s an intentionally static movie — Lord often is just sitting there while Giacometti paints — about art, words and ideas. In the contemporary crazy-quilt that is “Sorry to Bother You,” set in an alternative version of Oakland, Calif., he’s a comedic foil for laconic star Lakeith Stanfield from “Get Out” and the TV series “Atlanta.” One movie is solemnly art house, the other is wonderfully nut house.

One of the things that drew him to “Final Portrait” was working with Tucci. “He’s so clever and he’s so smart,” Hammer said. “This movie could be just these two people seated in a room talking the whole time…and I’m sure you’d find some inherent drama there but [in this movie] you’re getting that voyeuristic look into Giacometti’s life from someone who’s just sitting there so long who is very much paying attention. So it allows the audience to pay attention…so that you feel like you’re a part of this crazy artist’s lifestyle.”

The film’s quietude initially unnerved Hammer. “It just made me nervous that this is a movie that doesn’t have any sort of big set pieces. There’s no huge conflict. There’s no real antagonist of the film. The only thing that propels the film, beat by beat, is the emotional honesty of these two people…It’s a daunting challenge as an actor to know that the only thing that will make this movie work is acting. There’s nothing to hide behind. There’s no safety net.”

“Sorry to Bother You,” the first film from musician-turned-director Boots Riley, couldn’t have been a more different experience from working with a veteran like Tucci. “[It’s] drastically different from anything else I’ve ever done in my life,” Hammer said. “Boots Riley, he’s just one of the largest raw creative talents I’ve ever seen…He had none of the encumbrances of ‘I’ve done this so many times.’ He just went right at it and gung-ho went head-first into it…It turned out to be a really unique project.”

Texas to the Caymans

Hammer may only be in Austin for a short time during this visit but he’s no stranger to the Lone Star State.

Though born in Los Angeles, he moved as a young child with his parents to Dallas – specifically, tony Highland Park – for a time before then moving to the Cayman Islands. He still has relatives in the Dallas area and his wife, Elizabeth Chambers, who hails from a deeply rooted San Antonio family, opened her first Bird Bakery in the Alamo City in 2012, followed soon after by another location in Highland Park. They visit Texas for family or business reasons often, so his Texas ties are legit. But it was his time in the Caribbean that honed his love of the movies.

“Down there, movies became a really big part of my life,” Hammer said. “Yes, it was a tropical island paradise but, at the same time, island fever is a very real thing. For me, there was a real escape of sitting in a movie theater while being on a little, tiny island and then being anywhere in the world, or out of the world. Being on Mars, being on the Titanic, being wherever. It was just this transformative nature of film that I really fell in love with.”

‘Straight White Men’

As part of his effort to take roles more for their appeal to him as an artist as opposed to commercial potential, he will star along with Tom Skerritt in the Broadway production “Straight White Men,” which begins its run at the end of June. He describes it as “the story of toxic masculinity and what happens in modern society when a straight white man stops acting like a straight white man,” he said.

So does all this mean that he’s not going to show any flicker of interest when the next mega-budget blockbuster crosses his path? “It all depends on the director,” he said. “If there’s a great project with an amazing director and we click, and we want to work together but it’s a big project, then I wouldn’t say ‘no,’ just because it’s a big project,” he said. “But it’s not like I’m actively seeking anything like that out.”

Now, Hammer says, he’s learned better how to separate his personal and professional lives so that the latter doesn’t negatively affect the former. “Anybody in this business can have a propensity for self-loathing. I wouldn’t say that my career has been tortured in any way but, at the same time, it’s easy to torture yourself,” he said. “It’s easy to allow any of the downs in the ups and downs to really kind of affect you.

“It’s just about finding a healthy way to establish emotional boundaries where it’s the business versus who I actually am as a person. How much do I allow that to affect me? Is it good if I allow it to affect me as a motivator? There’s a lot to it. It’s a fine line, and I’m still trying to figure it out.”

IMAGE: Arnie Hammer Sony Pictures Classics

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